One of the world's most important programmers works from home in his bathrobe in complete silence

Linus Torvalds, the founder and maintainer of the incredibly
popular free Linux operating system, spends his days working from
home in a bathrobe in complete silence.

Torvalds revealed his work process on stage at this
week's TED conference, the BBC reports.

It's a deceptively unassuming look for Torvalds, the man behind
Linux. While not as well-known as Windows or Mac OSX, Linux is an
operating system that powers the servers running the Internet. It
also underlies just about every banking and market trading system
and serves as the core of Google Android.

Linux is an open source operating system, meaning anyone can use
it for free and customize it to their own needs. And more than
12,000 developers from more than 1,200 companies have not only
done that, but have seen their work added back to the main
Linux project (the "kernel" in geek-speak), according to a
recent report from the Linux Foundation.

It's a real badge of honor for a developer to contribute to the
Linux kernel.

To do that, however, they've got to go through Torvalds. He has
the ultimate say over what code gets added to the Linux kernel
and what doesn't. And he manages
the whole thing from home.

As his casual bathrobe look might suggest, Torvalds is not one to
put on airs — in that same TED talk, Torvalds says "I am not
a visionary. I'm an engineer. I'm happy with the people who are
wandering around looking at the stars but I am looking at the
ground and I want to fix the pothole before I fall in."

But Torvalds is also notoriously demanding (and
foul-mouthed) when it comes to contributions to Linux.

In January 2015, he
infamously remarked"I'm not a nice person, and I don't
care about you. I care about the technology and the kernel —
that's what's important to me." In his TED talk,
Torvalds confirms "I am not a people person."